Thursday,
December 10 - Saturday, December 12
Archive
Fever 1.0
In
this series, we explore the myriad ways in which the archive
and archival and found materials have been central to the works
of numerous film and video artists. The archive is a repository
for personal memories, shared histories, objects and documents
through which we process the history of our time, and it has
become central to our visual culture. In the past two decades,
increasingly more film and video artists have been discovering
the dynamic possibilities within archives, creating new modes
for archival practice and create new content to use as vehicles
for exploration. In 1995, Jacques Derrida’s seminal piece “Archive
Fever” guided us through an extended meditation on remembrance,
religion, time and technology in his deconstructive analysis
of the concept of archiving. The artist’s practices, as in Derrida’s
concept, revolve around history, identity and memory, and perhaps
threaten to transform the entire public and private space of
humanity.
Thursday,
December 10 at 7pm
Chick
Strand – Image, word and first person epistolary
Born
Mildred Strand (1932 - 2009), she was given the nickname Chick
by her father. Strand studied anthropology at Berkeley, and
in the early 1960s organized film happenings with Bruce Baillie.
She edited Canyon Cinema-News with Baillie and Ernest
Callenbach, which became a focal point for the West Coast independent
film movement. For over thirty years Strand made regular trips
to Mexico with her second husband Neon Park. Strand's ethnographic
films are distinctive for their complex layering of sound and
image, and the juxtaposition of found footage and sound with
images she shot herself.
Cartoon
le Mousse
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1979, 16mm, 12 mins, b/w
"Chick
Strand is a prolific and prodigiously gifted film artist who
seems to break new ground with each new work. Her recent ‘found
footage’ works, such as Cartoon Le Mousse, are extraordinarily
beautiful, moving, visionary pieces that push this genre into
previously unexplored territory. If poetry is the art of making
evocative connections between otherwise dissimilar phenomena,
then Chick Strand is a great poet, for these films transcend
their material to create a surreal and sublime universe beyond
reason." - Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema
Krystallnacht
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1979, 16mm, 8 mins, b/w
Dedicated
to the memory of Anne Frank, and the tenacity of the human spirit.
Soft
Fiction
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1979, 16mm, 55 mins, b/w
Chick
Strand's Soft Fiction is a personal documentary that
brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality.
It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical
expressionism… Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant,
innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation
of the tough resilience of the human spirit. - Marsha Kinder,
Film Quarterly
Coming
up for Air
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1986, 16mm, 26 mins, color
A
"new narrative" film based on the visions of magic
realism in an Anglo context. This is a gothic mystery that explores
a reckless pursuit of interchangeable personalities and experience.
The sources for this film include night dreams, the idea of
holocaust, the exoticness of the Mid East, the sensuality of
animals, the explorations of Scott in Antarctica, and the film
The Son of Amir Is Dead.
Waterfall
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1967, 16mm, 3 mins, color
A
film poem using found film and stock footage altered by printing,
home development and solarization. It is a film using visual
relationships to invoke a feeling of flow and movement with
Japanese Koto music.
Mujer
De Milfuegos
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1976, 16mm, 15 mins, color
Not
a personal portrait so much as an evocation of the consciousness
of women in rural parts of such countries as Spain, Greece and
Mexico where women wear black from the age 15 and spend their
entire lives giving birth, preparing food and tending to household
and farm responsibilities. A kind of heretic fantasy film, his
is an expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American
woman.
Mosori
Monika
dir.
Chick Strand, US, 1970, 16mm, 21 mins, color
In
this expressive documentary about women in the Third World,
a nun tells how the Indians lived when the missionaries arrived
and what the nuns have done to "improve" conditions,
both spiritually and materially. An old Warao Indian woman tells
what she feels have been the important experiences in her life.
Friday,
December 11 at 8pm
An
Evening with Christina Battle
Co-presented
by PIFVA - Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association
Christina
Battle has established herself as a significant artist and arts
educator in the Toronto film community since moving there from
Edmonton in 2002. She rigorously combines celluloid hand-processing
techniques with a variety of other imaging methods. Battle’s
tactile, DIY approach to film production finds a powerful accompaniment
in the themes she explores - history and counter-memory, ideology
and political mythology, gender, and environmental catastrophe.
Effectively, the combination of Battle’s processes and subject
matter is a hand-to-hand artistic engagement with some of our
most pressing historical and contemporary issues. - Scott Birdwise,
Programmer, The Canadian Film Institute (2008).
oil
wells: sturgeon road & 97th street
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2002, 16mm, 3 mins, color
Highlighting
the repetitive nature of oil wells in northern Alberta, this
hand processed film documents a sighting common to the Canadian
prairies, simultaneously managing to recall Cecile Fontaine's
delicacy of emulsion-layering technique while paying homage
to Pat O'Neill's 7362 (1967), and evoking with marvelous
understatement the grand prize at the heart of the imperialist
resource wars.
paradise
falls, new mexico
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2004, 16mm, 5 mins, color
The
desert wind from America’s Southwestern ghost towns blows through
the film’s emulsion, stripping away the myth behind the imagery
of shoot-outs, outlaws and the lone gunmen from Hollywood Westerns.
buffalo
lifts
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2004, 16mm, 3 mins, color, silent
A
herd of buffalo desperately try to hold on as they cross the
film frame. In aprocess called "emulsion lifting",
the image of the buffalos was produced by boiling the original
pictures and resettling them onto a new length of film.
hysteria
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2006, 35mm, 4 mins, b/w
In
hysteria, Battle refers more obliquely to the contemporary
political climate using schoolbook illustrations of the Salem
witch trials. She works the surface of the film in distinctive
ways, lifting the emulsion to add new wrinkles to the image
one frame at a time. - Chris Gehman & Andrea Picard, Toronto
International Film Festival
three
hours, fifteen minutes before the hurricane struck
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2006, 35mm, 5 mins, b/w, silent
Inspired
by the diorama-like boxes of Joseph Cornell, and with text taken
from victims of hurricane Katrina, three hours, fifteen
minutes before the hurricane struck imagines moments just
before a violent weather storm.
Behind
the Shadows
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2009, 16mm, 17 mins, color
Outside
the window a storm like no other is taking shape. Behind
the Shadows documents the imagined moment when the delicate
balance between natural and developed worlds began to shift.
As if caught in a void between dream and reality, characters
struggle to reconcile threats from the outside environment.
Inspired by natural disaster horror movies, Behind the Shadows
examines how popular media has shaped our understandings
of fear.
wandering
through secret storms
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2009, 16mm, 7 mins, color
In
the not-so-distant future, an old government archive is discovered.
Asworkers sift through the files in an attempt to put them into
context, a storm
locked
up since the past is unleashed.
suddenly
everything changed
dir.
Christina Battle, Canada, 2009, 16mm, color
Looking
back, the clues were clear. But by the time the emergency crews
took flight it was too late. Things will never be the same.
Saturday,
December 12 at 2pm
Working with
the Loop –Workshop/Master Class with Christina Battle
Presented
by PIFVA - Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association
Continually turning
back upon itself and endlessly repeating, the loop creates a
unique relationship with viewers and allows artists not only
to draw attention to, but also to sculpt time in unique ways.
With a DIY approach and working within the confines of the loop,
we will consider how working at the level of the (16mm film)
frame can allow artists to manipulate time using handmade and
manipulation techniques (painting, scratching, collage).
Saturday,
December 12 at 5pm
Yervant
Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi – Fragments and Assemblages
Milan-based
filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are renowned
for their accomplished work with archival footage derived principally
from the 1910s and 1920s. Thoughtfully juxtaposing images, Gianikian
and Ricci Lucchi also re-photograph their material, adjusting
the film's speed, adding tinted color and spare soundtracks,
and reframing the image to focus on key details. Such meticulous
manipulation encourages viewers to read the footage instead
of simply watching it, so as to consider not only what the images
mean, but how. The spare and intense films of Gianikian and
Ricci Lucchi wring both irony and a strange, mournful in the
images they select, bearing witness to the ravages of time and
the destructive power of the European nations and their armies.
Karagoez:
Catalogue 9.5
dir.
Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Italy, 1981, 16mm,
56 mins, color and b/w
In
1977, Yervant Gianikian came upon a whole store of 9.5mm films
dating from the beginnings of motion pictures to 1928 - silent
movies reproduced from 35mm copies (the originals of which have
been lost). There were Enrico Guazzoni’s minor works, Il
canto dell’amore trionfante and Messaline of 1923,
Arnold Fanck’s 1926 Der heilige Berg starring Leni
Riefensthal, and a score of other, unidentifiable fiction and
documentary films. In wanting to show all of human behavior,
Karagoez: Catalogue 9.5 manages only
to disclose our most mysterious poses.
Inventario
Balcanico (Balkan Inventory)
dir.
Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Italy, 2000, 35mm,
62 mins, b/w
The
accumulation of images of human and ecological disasters from
the former Yugoslavia prompted us to look for evidence of pre-existing
essential values, which could not possibly not exist. Records
of life as it was. Material for a film which celebrates life
over conflict and division. A work of analysis, based on formats
no longer used, no longer even projectable, to make indestructible
the memories preserved in the images we have found: films shot
by amateurs, by travelers, by Nazi soldiers in the Balkans.
- Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi.
Saturday,
December 12 at 7:30pm
Jim
Finn - Fabrications & Recycling
Director
Jim Finn in person
Jim
Finn is a critically acclaimed filmmaker who uses humor and
historical fiction to examine ideology, capitalism and revolutionary
art practices. Interkosmos, the
first of his trilogy of feature-length films looking at Marxist
ideology, was called "a retro gust of communist utopianism"
by the Village Voice and "charming and fantastic,
so full of rare atmospheres" by Canadian filmmaker Guy
Maddin. His second feature, La Trinchera
Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was listed by the
Village Voice as one of 2007’s top ten experimental
films.
The
Juche Idea
dir.
Jim Finn, US, 2008, video, 62 mins, color
Ready
for a Marxist-Leninist-musical documentary? Jim Finn, the Busby
Berkeley of propaganda, follows a South Korean video artist
in North Korea who hopes to revitalize Juche cinema. This is
no kitsch mockumentary, just a careful analysis of the love
of cinema that is as surreally funny as it is true. Isn't art
revolutionary? - Cinevegas Film Festival
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